UN to Vote on Membership for Palestine

The United Nations General Assembly is due to vote today on a resolution granting new rights and privileges to ‘Palestine’ and asking the Security Council to reconsider favourably its request to become the 194th member state.

On 18th April the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution for full membership, and US deputy ambassador Robert Wood stated on Thursday that the Biden administration is opposed to this General Assembly resolution.

The UN Charter requires prospective members to be “peace-loving” and receive a Security Council recommendation for admission, which then gets passed to the General Assembly for final approval. Robert Wood explained:

“We’ve been very clear from the beginning there is a process
for obtaining full membership in the United Nations,
and this effort by some of the Arab countries and the Palestinians
is to try to go around that.”

Despite US opposition, this vote is expected to gain widespread support through a mixture of anti-Israel bias and a longing for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to be resolved. But approval would be controversial for many democracies because the Palestinians support violent struggle against Israel, and it would be seen as a reward for terrorism – in particular the 7th October massacre led by Hamas.

Simon Birmingham, shadow foreign affairs minister in Australia, discussed this on Sky News Australia: